Sleet: Selected Stories

by Stig Dagerman

  It turns out that there’s a good deal he desires but cannot find the nerve to do this summer. The little notebook he always carries in his pocket is littered with scribblings of those desires: he feels like a string that has yet to be played, a taut string fearful of being plucked lest it should break, or like a dynamo spinning and spinning without any outcome.

  Now he lies here on the rock shelf in the broiling sun, drawing a small sailboat as it tacks in the sound. His boat isn’t bad, but he can’t say as much for his attempts to catch the water’s reflections shimmering in the midday heat or the flock of gulls that dive continuously into a yellow slick of something a couple sailors have poured out over a gunwale. On another island, just across the sound, two girls in red bathing suits are moving along the shore with small, timid steps, as music plays above them from a gramophone atop a rock cliff. Maybe they are afraid of snakes, which is enough to make anyone’s bare feet dart anxiously from toe to toe as they eye the grass before them. In boots you’re apt to take fearful lumbering steps as you whistle up into the empty air with a bit too much gusto. The strides of fear come in all walks, sure enough.

  Maybe he does know a good bit about life after all. He knows almost everything worth knowing about the art of scrounging soda from the hostess of the small steamer’s restaurant. And he knows what sherry tastes like, ever since he and a young college student shared half a bottle in the dining lounge one evening during a blind run. He has smoked eight different brands of cigarettes and discovered just how strong beer can get if you let it stew on the ship’s boiler. If asked, he can reveal the good and the bad about all of Sweden’s weekly magazines. And he can do the same when it comes to that great man of the people and defender of the arts who bought a notorious pornographic magazine off him — for research purposes, of course — and then bawled him out because the back cover had apparently gotten soiled in his tote bag. He also knows that if you want to be treated like a grown-up you should snap your head around and stare at the legs of any girl over a certain age who walks by you on the upper deck. For a week now he’s also known what it feels like to kiss.

  He learns this one evening from Barbro after taking a dip alone in the small cove where the water is always warm from the canal. The boat is dark and quiet when he returns from his swim. A hanging kerosene lamp has been lit in the waiting hut by the ferry dock across the sound, where a couple dances silently to a distantly wailing gramophone. As he boards the boat he encounters Barbro in the twilight of the upper deck.

  She says, “Would you like me to kiss you, Sune?”

  He has yearned so long and so intensely to know what it’s like to kiss that he isn’t sure his lips will be able to endure it. He’s afraid they may suddenly burst and spatter blood on her teeth, her lips and chin. So he says no and tries to step aside to rid her of the temptation. But she pulls him toward her with such force that his soap and towel fall to the floor, and then she kisses him squarely on the mouth. And then? Well, nothing. Nothing bad, anyway. They sit down on a bench nearby and continue, and he learns a great deal that evening. For instance, he learns that his lips can glide apart during a very long kiss so that his teeth actually scrape against hers. Like a boat’s hull when it runs aground, he thinks. He’s done an awful lot of reading this summer. Or he can stretch out his tongue and feel with delight how hers wriggles back. Or he can bite tenderly into her lip. Oh, yes.

  But a couple evenings later, when they’re alone again, she asks him if he’d like to take a walk with her on the island. Since he is still the unplayed string afraid of breaking, he says no to her. And then nothing more comes of it. She’s not about to force him. She doesn’t drag him into the woods by the canal, nor out upon the wet meadows, nor onto the naked rocks above the sighing sea. She leaves him alone with his poor body, which should bleed from all the torture he allows it to endure in its loneliness, from all the loathing he heaps on it during those long nights of white sin in the aft saloon. She leaves him there alone in the twilight on the rocky promontory above their little bathing spot, with its partial view of the sound, the sunken barge, the dark blue currents flowing slowly southward between the islands’ docks. Across the cove his eyes trail along two hundred yards of green, rocky shoreline to their own white vessel with its lifeboats fastened securely on the roof, its long line of gleaming portholes and windows, its foredeck crowded with yellow barrels of Baltic herring.

  From this height it’s even possible to see the black hatch leading into the fo’c’sle where Paul sleeps. He is the only one of the regular crew who doesn’t go home at night because he’s quarrelling with his wife. One evening after his swim, while Sune sits alone shivering on the promontory, he sees Barbro climb down through the hatch. He sits there for a long time after she closes the hatch behind her. Eventually his shivers subside, but she has not come back up. He takes up his notebook and sketches the boat and the dock. He draws the same picture four times, and yet she still has not come back up. A large well-lit motorboat passes by out on the sound, disappearing at last around the point with its muted drone. Not even when its wake finishes slapping against the rocky shore nearby has she come up again. He is anxious. Somewhere inside him something hurts. He undresses and swims out. The bottom disappears beneath him in the shimmering, dusky reflection as warm, sticky water laps into his mouth. But none of it makes any difference: she still has not come out from the fo’c’sle and he lacks the will to drown himself as he had vaguely hoped. After the swim he walks into the empty waiting hut on the dock, leaving the door wide open as he carves his name and the date of this night into a beam. Not even before he has finished doing this does she appear again from the hatch. At some point later he finds himself on the foredeck drawing the distant rock shelf and the old barge half-sunken into the mud, the spiny outline of the woods, and the moon rolling above it all. Essentially this same moon shines over victory and defeat. Later that night as he lies pitifully naked beneath a blanket in the aft saloon, he hears her in the middle of his dream sneaking back across the deck and whimpers like a dog until her steps disappear.

  It’s Sunday now and he has just been caught by the cook’s husband make-believe fencing with some bushes up above the dock. So he’s moved off across the cove to lie by himself atop the high exposed shelf of rock. Lying there on his side he sketches and thinks, and for a while at least he believes that he may have things figured out. The boat slumbers, casting its wide black shadow into the depths of the sunlit cove. Only the cook’s spindly husband stirs on the dock in his white shirt, his hands resting together against his lower back as he kicks a stone or two into the water before swinging round.

  Then the little dishwasher Greta appears with Alfhild, the pale Sunday waitress. Out for a Sunday stroll, the pair head up the path with their elbows linked. At the shelf of high exposed rock, they stop beside him and look down. He can feel himself starting to sweat intensely under his official newsstand jacket, although nothing in particular is going on.

  “Bon soir,” Greta says. “Bon soir, bon soir.” He doesn’t have to look up to know what she looks like right now. She’s almost certainly smiling, with her thin upper lip pulled back taut above her teeth, which look like they’re covered in cement, sweating cement. The deep wrinkles in this young old woman’s face fan out around her eyes, giving birth to an ancient Chinese every time she laughs. He detests those wrinkles, those revolting teeth.

  “You, sir, should rub suntan lotion on when you’re out sunning yourself,” says Alfhild, who never misses a chance to remind folks how she usually works as an extra in the movies. She claims the outline of her face from her temple down to her chin is similar to Signe Hasso’s — no, that it is exactly like Signe Hasso’s — and she often traces this outline with her frail index finger when she thinks someone is looking at her, maybe even sometimes when she’s alone.

  “Next thing you know,” Paul quipped recently. “Next thing she’ll be showing us how her thighs are just like Marlene Dietrich’s.” And then he added cynica
lly, “And I got no objections there. The hatch is always open.” Sune hadn’t laughed, because at that moment he hated him. The last few nights this week, just before falling asleep, he has fantasized about surprising the two of them with an ice pick. But in his fantasy he never drives the pick into them, he just brandishes it nobly above their smutty, obscene, sweating bodies to make it clear he has the means if not the will to do it.

  “What are you drawing?” asks Greta. He slams the notebook shut, embarrassed. But then he is embarrassed to be embarrassed and so he opens it again and shows her everything.

  Then they sit there, the three of them, looking out over the sound. Someone has just launched a small flotilla of toy sailboats from a rowboat, and they are soon running gently over the water’s surface southward before the wind like a gaggle of white geese.

  “You didn’t get those,” Greta says, pointing to his note pad. Her nails are exceptionally dirty.

  “I didn’t get that either,” he says and gestures to a hawk, tracing its small black arc of menace over the sound.

  Suddenly Barbro comes out on the front deck in a swimsuit. She stands for a while in the sun and waves up to them, lithe, smiling, and confident. Odd that it doesn’t show on her, he thinks, and yet it doesn’t. There’s nothing there to indicate she’s in the habit of sneaking down to Paul’s quarters in the twilight and then sneaking back across the forward deck in the darkest hours of night. He doesn’t think she should have the right to look so clean. Something should happen to her milky, immaculate body so that anyone who lays eyes on it would know immediately what she’s been up to, but nothing does happen, and life is so unfair. She dives beautifully over the railing. The arc of the dive is so graceful that its ghost seems to hang in the hot air for a moment, quivering, as she disappears beneath the water. When she surfaces again her bathing cap shines, a white float against the blue water. Glimmering droplets cling to the fine hairs on her milky legs as she climbs slowly toward them on the path. Then as she makes her way across the shelf of exposed rock, beginning to remove her bathing cap, she smiles at him, smiles at all of them, and her hair springs forth radiantly. She turns then and walks beyond them ten yards or so, and that’s when he becomes aware of all the tension choking the air. There is thunder in this heated, innocent air, and all at once his smile disappears. His face hardens and he can’t help thinking that it will never soften again.

  Go on, he thinks. Go down into the fo’c’sle. Go down there and let him hug you, let him bite you, let him have his way with you in every position imaginable.

  Then Greta calls over to Barbro and her voice is so singular — so hard and sharp and icy — that he can’t help looking up at her in surprise.

  “Bon soir,” she cries. “Bon soir!”

  Then he looks at Alfhild, with her mouth slightly open and tongue peering out of its nest. The contours of her face are hardened, especially around the mouth. And it’s only then that he becomes aware of the strong bond uniting them, the feelings of mutual sympathy flowing among these three on the rock shelf, the one mourning her lost youth, the other her lost beauty, and the third mourning simply the lost, all that is and has been lost. He would like to put his head down on one of their shoulders and cry. He would like one of them to have a good cry on his shoulder.

  “Your French is very good, Greta,” he says, caressing her with all six words.

  “Bon soir,” says Greta and smiles her smile so full of bad teeth. But he isn’t put off by it so much now. At least it no longer makes him feel like throwing up. “Bon soir. The headmistress, she always said ‘Our Greta has a real gift for languages!’ At the home they always spoke of my gift for languages.”

  What home? he wonders. What headmistress? Then, as usual, he can’t help himself. He begins to feel sorry for himself and so he tells them how he normally attends school, during the rest of the year, that is. Yes, normally he’s a student of French, from the fall through the spring. It’s only during summer vacation that he has to take this job. The only way of salvaging his pathetic life is by elevating it above the stench and the filth and the callousness all around him. He commends Greta on her language skills, though she can only say bon soir, and he makes up a story about a Frenchman who visited his school and pronounced it exactly the same way — exactly.

  That’s when he notices Alfhild opening her mouth a couple of times to get in a word. And so after extolling Greta for her language aptitude, before moving on to the subject of his own mastery of English, he pauses for a second or two, and Alfhild seizes the moment to lift her pale face toward the clouds and turns toward both of them. He may only be fifteen-years-old, but still he can tell how years of anxiety have deepened the lines in this face, so faintly trembling now.

  “Do you see this outline, right here?” she says as her fingers fumble blindly across her face. “This outline is exactly like Signe Hasso’s.”

  “Yes,” he lies quickly, and with compassion. “It’s amazing how much you resemble her. You could easily pass as a relative of hers.”

  And the sun shines down on the wicked and the good alike, on all the boats that clip along through the sound with their great flags trailing in their wakes, and on the long black barge train bearing roof tiles just like any other Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, but not at all like a sunny Sunday in August. They sit there on the rock shelf for another half an hour or so sharing silences, occasionally trading words of little consequence and even less meaning. Close together they sit and smile, some thirty, fifty, seventy feet above their failures.

  Soon bicycle tires can be heard on the small road below, sizzling like frying pans, as all the folks heading to the city slowly begin to fill up the dock’s benches on the other side of the cove, awaiting the boat’s departure whistle. A horse-drawn cart filled with overpacked bags and other items signifying the end of someone’s summer comes along the road, and as it wobbles along Greta and Alfhild join arms again and make their way down to the boat to prep the galley. Sune, on the other hand, strolls for a bit along the shoreline, collecting unusual-looking stones. When he has collected enough of them, he throws them all pointlessly into the water. Altogether pointlessly. Then he heads down to the boat, where an old man with white unruly hair sticking out from beneath his sailor’s cap tells him that he wants a copy of For All Tastes, the latest issue of For All Tastes. He has to tell this man that that magazine was discontinued a long time ago, ages ago.

  The upper deck is empty. From the galley comes a boisterous laugh and out through a hatch leading down to the engine room clamor the repetitive strokes of hammers and pistons. He makes his way down a dark creaking stair toward the aft saloon where he spends his nights hating his naked body. As he passes the first cabin, the door to the last compartment ahead of him opens and out steps Greta. She suddenly positions herself right in front of him in the narrow passageway and opens her arms wide. Now he has only two choices: turn back and climb up the steps again or walk straight into her embrace. He does not go back up the steps. He allows her to pull him in tight against her body, in turn resting his hands gingerly on her back, mostly out of politeness, sympathy, fear of hurting her feelings. Though he is only fifteen years old and will not be fully grown for some time, she barely comes up to his chin. A bit of her hair gets caught in his mouth until she arches her neck backward to let his eyes take in her little pinscher face, and at that point any desire that might have stirred in him is swept away instantly: those teeth, the tight narrow lips, the wrinkles. He understands that she wants him to kiss her. Can’t she understand that he doesn’t want to?

  But they are both startled as someone begins rummaging around in the captain’s quarters and in the confusion they let go of one another.

  “Tonight!” she whispers quickly. “Come to my quarters tonight!”

  “OK, tonight,” he whispers back, lying with the clean conscience tall liars always feel toward shorter dupes. “I’ll come tonight.”

  As always, the aft saloon’s stifling, murky air is laced
with the mixed scents of secrecy and somnolence. Sune rests there for a while on the couch that doubles as his bed until he hears the captain step out of his cabin, laboring for breath as he bears his two hundred and fifty pounds up the steep steps. It isn’t long before the departure whistle blows and then right away hurried steps tramp across the deck overhead, as a few women’s voices stand out animated among many others. The engine engages, the propeller rumbling into motion. By the time he makes it up the steps they are already backing out into the sound as some rowers in nearby boats hurry to get out of the way.

  Then everything goes just the way it always does, the way it has gone a hundred times before. He lifts his bag out of its locker. At each of their stops new passengers board while well-wishers remain behind on the docks. Some hang around feigning interest in the hawsers and the gangplank, but are more likely interested in seeing whether the first mate, an amiable fellow a bit too fond of the bottle, will fall overboard this Sunday. The boat sweeps narrowly past idly rocking sailboats whose half-naked passengers are defenseless against all the probing gazes. Men with ample bellies and binoculars stand on the foredeck arguing over the names of the islands visible furthest in the distance and young girls going on holiday look out through the portholes giggling at virtually everything they see. Many people buy magazines and newspapers from him, hefty Sunday editions either to peruse or to hide their nudist magazine inside. People often ask him if the bag is heavy, and he always answers “seventy-five pounds” because that makes him sound so robust and self-assured. Then they remark to one another about the coming fall, how “it’s well on its way,” and when he hears this he can’t help thinking to himself how that’s what they always say. The captain, who is so fat that he needs help lacing his boots, stands on the bridge smoking his two hundred and fifty-pound cigar. In the galley they joke about how you can always tell when he ambles over to the port side of the vessel. After an hour or so the day seems to sink gradually into the water behind them, and the islands furthest out turn slowly blue as milk as they wrap themselves in the gathering mist. In the fairway they are joined by three other white boats. One has a large, arrogant, blue and yellow chimney, and it takes the lead, plowing a wide glistening path that the other two vessels veer into, looking something like greyhounds falling in behind the leader. As they approach the port town of Waxholm, all the docks are filled with people who look as though they will never again have a vacation. In the dusky waters below their own boat waits a rowboat laden with all Sune’s evening editions. As usual, the skipper stomps his unlaced boots and curses the oarsman’s clumsy maneuvers. Paul fishes up the bundle with a boat hook and then they glide through the narrow channel separating the port town from its great island fortress offshore. All the boats docked along the Waxholm quay have lit their evening lights and from the roof of the restaurant in port hang strings of lanterns in assorted colors.